Adobe

Update: I've since received my licence key, after purchasing with my credit card directly, instead of using paypal. See my more recent post.

I'm getting so frustrated with Adobe. I've tried out the demo of their Photoshop Lightroom 2 software, and I'm really really happy with it. It makes the process of offloading, organizing, processing, and uploading my photos so much easier. It's the part of photography I've always enjoyed (and thus postponed) the most, because it's so time consuming, and frustrating, because I never had a good way of doing it all. Lightroom just makes it so much faster, and less painful, so I decided to buy it.

Easier said than done. You'd think that when you want to give a company $300 for a piece of software, not even for a box, just to download it, which costs them virtually nothing, you'd think they would be tripping over their feet to take your money and give you the software. Of course not. I've tried purchasing it three times now. I'm still waiting for the third attempt to work or not. The first time, their billing address form had "United States" as the country, and I couldn't change it, so I couldn't enter my billing address to pay for the software. The second time, the next day, the country field was magically correct, so I went all the way through, and paid for it with paypal. It took them two and a half hours to finally email me back, saying "Unfortunately we were unable to approve your order in the Adobe Store." I've tried again now with my credit card, and I hope it works this time, because I have a bunch of photos I want to go through and get uploaded.

In contrast, when I've wanted to spend a mere $20 on some independent developer's game, I've had a "Thank you, here's your license key, and here's where to download the game" email within 5 minutes every time.

For all the complaining they do about software piracy, Adobe needs to get their act together on the sales side. If it's taken me hours of trying, and three tries, for the privilege of giving them money, and a fair chunk of it, for their software, it's no wonder people pirate it.